Getting Started with Modular Boost Library Maintenance

This page describes the mechanics of maintaining a Boost library using Git and Modular Boost. The intended audience is developers involved in the maintenance of existing Boost libraries.

The Big Picture

Library maintenance occurs in the context of how Boost is organized. Please study the Modular Boost Overview since a Boost developer needs to be familiar with how Boost organizes its repositories.

Prerequisites

• A recent release of the Git command line client installed. See Getting Started with Git.
• A (free) ​GitHub account. See Getting Started with GitHub.
• A compiler and development environment installed and working smoothly.
• Modular Boost installed as described in Getting Started with Modular Boost.
• b2 in your path. That allows most of the command line examples given here to work as shown on both Windows and POSIX-like systems.

Checking out the branch

cd modular-boost/libs/mylib
git branch

Will tell you what branch your local repo working copy is on. To change to develop for a really simple bug fix do this:

cd modular-boost/libs/mylib
git checkout develop

You only have to do that once; your local repo working copy will sit on that branch until it is explicitly changed by a command you give.

If there is any possibility the branch in the public upstream repo has changed, you also will want to:

git pull

Verify Tests Working

Before making any changes to you library, which we will call mylib, be sure the test suite is working in the modular Boost environment:

cd test
b2

Fix a simple bug

These commands could be used for any Git project, modular or not, so hopefully you are already somewhat familiar with them:

cd modular-boost/libs/mylib
# make edits
# test as above
git commit -a -m "my bug fix"
git push

Start work on a new feature

Simple bugs are usually fixed on the develop branch, at least in smaller projects. There is usually no need to first create a bug-fix branch. But git developers usually create a (possibly private) branch to work on new features, since development of new features on the development branch might leave it unstable for longer that expected.

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